panta rhei

The word panta rhei derives from Greek and literally means "all things are in constant flux". The famous axiom of Heraclitus, (c.540- c.480 BC) Greek philosopher of Ephesus, was frequently quoted by Plato. Heraclitus is also known for illustrating the persistence of unity through change by the analogy of the river: "upon those who step into the same river different and ever different waters flow down".

The IT infrastructures nowadays are in constant flux. A recent study concluded many of today's IT infrastructures are poorly administrated and, even at peak use, under-utilized. For enterprise software, this could mean unnecessary spending on licenses, costly license infractions, or both. It is evident, that enterprises are in a need for solutions.

There is weekly at least one systems management and/or software inventory tool introduced on the market. They all promise to solve your software and hardware inventory problems in a snap. They speak of off-the-shelf, out-of-the-box solutions delivering in minutes.

You either already believed them once or believe them never.

Software Inventory Creation

There is no easy software inventory creation. You can certainly perform fast audits with super-automated and flashy tools from industry leading vendors, but with misleading results (e.g. uninstalled, non-existing software appearing in the inventory; in the absence of Microsoft compatible file-header information DOS software completely missing from the inventory; one Windows or Office appearing as a whole series of separate software; no results for single-user machines not attached to the network; no language information, for countries outside the United States and United Kingdom; etc.).

Our software inventory tool might seem more than old-fashioned comparing to these sumptuous and expensive gadgets, but it has one basic strength.. Since it is based on ISACA principles, we could not circumvent the only need real need of our clients: and that is to provide the with accurate and usable software inventory reports.

Questions arising

• Would you like to lower your IT expenditures by cutting the costs of unneeded licenses with confidence?
• Would you like to identify areas of overspending?
• Would you like to renegotiate multi-volume licence agreements?
• Does your company have budget and resource constraints?
• Would you like to know who are the gamers wasting your valuable time and computing resources?
• Have you deployed Microsoft SMS© and you have difficulties in generating and designing reports for the management?
• Would you like to combat illegal users threatening to ruin your reputation?
• Are you interested in decomposing your software and hardware inventory on cost centers like divisions and departments?
• Are you aware how many and what type of audio files are downloaded to the clients machine?ˇ Would you like to know exactly how many freeware, licensed or shareware application do you have?
• Do you want to know the language differences between applications?
• Would you like to do more with limited resources?

If you are embarrassed by more than one of the above questions, you need to download the evaluation version of panta rhei© at once.

Benefits

• Become more responsive
• Reduce cost effectively
• Maintain productivity
• Simplify the tedious task of cutting expenses
• Find out who has installed and never used applications
• Do more with limited resources
• Renegotiate business contracts based on license needs
• Track application usage
• Fully scalable to fit any organisation

Whether your corporation already deployed a systems management or a software/hardware inventory solution, please come and talk to us. And you will have a completely new and different view of the story. And above all, ultimately you can achieve the goals, that your management was always asking for and you were always striving.

Distinguishing features

Reality-based
There is one basic difference: other systems management tools and software inventory applications are written by developers sitting in ivory-towers. The developer companies are employing excellent developers. However they completely lack the experience, the know-how and the routine our developers get during everyday software license management audits. They gain their knowledge from everyday life. They meet regularly our certified auditors; they listen to the clients and exchange their views. They are driven by customer's needs.

Intelligent
With panta rhei© you can unleash the real power of Microsoft Systems Management Server© (from version 2.0 up) and provide reports that are finally helping the decision-makers.

Resource saver
Well-known applications of industry-leaders are more and more resource hungry. The scanner of panta rhei© is not-installed as a terminate-and-stay-resident program or a service- constantly putting load on your system -, but is managed by a small utility called PRMonitor©. This provides unparalleled flexibility in point-to-point communication, even of mobile-workforce over poor telecommunication lines. Once deployed, the client can be fully maintained, updated and reconfigured remotely.

Fully scalable and independent
Our team designed panta rhei© from the very first moment with scalability in mind. Therefore it can exploit all the benefits of industry-leading RDBM systems like Oracle©, Microsoft SQL Server©, IBM DB/2©. However if none of the above is available, panta rhei© can run as a stand-alone server on its own database framework, thus lowering the workload on database servers.

Hierarchical
To the best of our knowledge, there is no software or hardware inventory tool decomposing the collected items into subsections. Our built-in FlexArchical feature is providing you with three-tier logic enabling the juxtaposition of the inventory items to cost-centers like divisions and/or departments.

Contemporary, yet pure
The present is complex, stressful and there is a complete lack of time on the side of the IT administrators. Our contemporary, yet completely user-friendly look-and-feel helps administrators understand the usage in minutes. The flashy, complex graphical user interfaces were avoided for that reason and the software inventory process is driving the menu logic.

Easy deployment
To start using panta rhei© right away, there is no need to send your most valuable people for week-long trainings or sophisticated education. However, if you want to fully exploit all the features of it, you might need some consultation. Since the scanner is not interfering with the registry, no classical setup is needed. Therefore numerous ways of distributing the scanner to the clients are in existence, including the usage of industry-leading distribution tools from Microsoft, IBM, Computer Associates, etc.

Compatible
The same scanner is running in all Windows operating environments, regardless of whether the client belongs to the Windows 95/98/ME or Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 families of products. The panta rhei© community is also developing scanners for Netware©, UNIX© and various Linux distributions. It is completely compatible wit the best hardware inventory tool ever.

Manageable
The administrator is fully aware of the whole process and can even control it. The resulting files of the scanner are stored in a human readable form and their import via the panta rhei© console can be customized: whether automatically (in batch mode) or manually (one-by-one) should they be processed.

Extensible
Despite the claims coming from well-known vendors, it is doubtless that the file-to-product recognising strategy is the only one that works, and the only one providing usable and accurate reports.
Our database includes more than 20.000 well-known commercial, shareware and freeware products from almost 2000 manufacturers, publishers and developers. This means more than 100.000 software items with relevant characteristics (file name, file size, file creation date). The above mentioned manual type of import is allowing you to recognize unknown files and to expand the database even with unique applications developed for you or by you. Your live table of software products can be merged at any time with the table of commercial products frequently updated by us and downloadable from our Web-site. And all that, without loosing the efforts invested into expanding your local database.

Accelerative
If you do not have the time to perform a detailed software inventory, you can use the AccelerantInventory feature built into panta rhei©. It is a sort of a first-aid, providing you with immediate reports. However, we need to stress again, that only the full file-to-product inventory described above can avoid misleading elements and confusing reports.

Flexible
The scanner can be configured to collect a wide variety of file types. It is indeed depending on the administrator to choose, what type of information will be collected: e.g. it can be configured to look for video and audio files. That way, you will not just be able to discover users putting your prestige to a risk, but backsliders in the future will be discovered as well.

Unique
The unique GameSensing technology allows you to sort out gamers wasting valuable time and IT resources. The unique LicenceTypeDifferentiation feature is to be found nowhere else: in an average corporation of 1000 machines, you will need tools to distinguish between thousands of reported applications and to pick the ones really needed. LanguageSensing technology makes panta rhei© usable in non-English environments by distinguishing languages, thus making it really international.

Cost-effective
Deploying panta rhei© will by no means cost you a fortune. There is no necessity to uninstall your current tool, therefore further optimization of deployment costs and decreasing significantly deployment times are achieved.

Standard, dealing with non-standard issues
The scanner is extracting DMI compatible information from the BIOS of the examined client. But, even brand-name vendors are sometimes bypassing these standards. The team members developing critical components are even getting valuable information (primarily it is the serial number) out of non-DMI compliant BIOS's.

Requirements